Lorna Mitchell

A developer shares her experiences using this open source solution for creating queues in web applications. Read on to get her take!

Let's take a look at a short tutorial that gives an explanation of the vim settings for working with YAML.

If you make server-side requests to external APIs using PHP, then check this out. It isn't a new thing with PHP, and this post targets newer versions of PHP.

Want to learn more about using ngork? Check out this tutorial on how to use config files with ngork for testing locally on your applications.

In this article, one dev shares her opinions on handling webhooks and provides some sample code in PHP to show how she usually does it.

Here's a quick overview about using the RETURNING keyword in PostgreSQL, letting you return values from after you run your insert or update statements.

Check out this step-by-step guide to put together the puzzle of deploying to a hosted RabbitMQ service.

I find myself needing to take a PDF, output it at a specific size, and have the result offset to the top right hand side of the screen. To achieve it, I needed a few new switches to my good friend PDFJam, so I thought I'd share my command! pdfjam --suffix converted --papersize '{1920px,1080px}' --scale 0.4 --trim "-6cm -1cm 13cm 8cm" slides.pdf The --suffix is instead of giving an output filename, whatever you feed in ends up with the suffix in its filename. This is very handy because I use this command in a script and only need to pass in one variable. The --papersize isn't a switch I have used before either but you can set exact sizes for the final output which is nice. The --trim switch can also be used to set --clip=true to remove the trimmed space from the document if desired. I find PDFJam a very handy tool but with not nearly enough blog posts and code snippets around, so I'm dropping my command for future reference (yours as well as mine!).

I use Charles Proxy extensively for debugging all kinds of applications, and lately I've been using it more with mobile devices. One of the killer features of Charles is its ability to intercept SSL traffic. This is hard - and rightly so, it should be difficult to inspect SSL traffic! Charles handles this by using the server's SSL certificate for the connection from Charles to the remote server, and then using Charles' own SSL certificate for the "last mile" back to your browser or device. This means that the connection will be flagged as insecure; Charles' certificates aren't trusted by your browser or device - but we can easily change that. Get Charles' Certificate On Windows, you can grab the certificate from the Help menu in Charles, but for OS X or Linux you'll need to download it from their website. It's linked from this excellent documentation page about SSL:http://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/using-charles/ssl-certificates/. Install it On Your Android Device Copy the ``.crt`` file into the root of your SD card (I found this didn't work in a subdirectory, although some documentation suggests it will). Under "Security" -> "Settings", choose "install from device storage" and it should pick up the certificate you put on the SD card. ... that's it :) Check you have enabled the destination for SSL proxying under "Proxy Settings" in Charles, and you're all set! Note, I have one device that refused to see the .crt file on the SD card, but when I emailed it to myself and then saved it from there, was added successfully. Thought I'd mention it! Further Reading Using Charles To Debug PHP SOAP Wireshark Capture on Remote Server View Only Headers with Curl

I've got an application (OK, scratty PHP script) that glues together some API things and shows them onto a dashboard for me. Recently, I updated it to use Guzzle as the consuming client, since Twitter now needs me to authenticate (I wrote about that if you're interested), and I used Composer to bring the new library in. It was very simple, so I thought I'd share it since it's quite a minimal example, and those are my favorite kind. Getting Started with Composer First of all, you'll need to either install composer, or at least get the .phar -- these examples use the composer.phar file from under the "Manual Download" section. Composer comes with instructions, for a list of command types: php composer.phar list Once you've got Composer ready to go, we can move on and configure it. State Your Dependencies All you need to do to use Composer is to create its configuration file and then tell it to do its magic. :) All I want here is the Guzzle library, so my config file is rather simple: { "require": { "guzzle/guzzle": "3.7" } } Get the Libraries From this point, Composer can do the rest by itself. It will fetch all the libraries you set in the config file, but will also get any dependencies of those libraries. To ask it to do this, just type: php composer.phar install This will download all the libraries you need and place them in a vendor directory. In the case of Guzzle, it depends on other libraries (from the Symfony project), so my vendor directory now contains: . ├── autoload.php ├── composer ├── guzzle └── symfony And there you have it: all the libraries you need are in place. Tell Your Application About Its Dependencies One more step: just add the following line into your application to make those new libraries available to it. require 'vendor/autoload.php'; There you go. :) Enjoy using Composer even in existing/legacy applications, projects that aren't built in "the one true way" or really anywhere else you don't want to have to include libraries in your repositories. Oh, and one more tip if you're just getting started: Add the vendor folder to your source control "ignore" file. Further Reading Nice post from Cal about including non-composer libs in your autoloader: http://blog.calevans.com/2013/07/21/using-3rd-party-libraries-in-composer-projects/ Composer documentation: http:// http://getcomposer.org/doc/ Further Reading Upgrading PHP Tools for Better PHP Twitter Search API Using PHP and Guzzle PSR-What?

Last week I tried to create a PHP stream context which set multiple headers; an Authorization header and a Content-Type header. All the examples I could find showed headers built up as a string with newlines added manually, which seemed pretty clunky and not-streams-like to me. In fact, you've been able to pass this as an array since PHP 5.2.10, so to set multiple headers in the stream context, I just used this: [ "method" => "POST", "header" => ["Authorization: token " . $access_token, "Content-Type: application/json"], "content" => $data ]]; $context = stream_context_create($options); The $access_token had been set elsewhere (in fact I usually put credentials in a separate file and exclude it from source control in an effort not to spread my access credentials further than I mean to!), and $data is already encoded as JSON. For completeness, you can make the POST request like this:

today's quick tip is something that was widely retweeted after my "debugging http" talk at the ever-fabulous whiskyweb conference last weekend. when working with json on the commandline, here's a quick tip for showing the json in a nicer format: curl http://api.joind.in | python -mjson.tool you need python installed, but the json extension is probably included, and that's all you need for this tool. the result is something like: you can also use this approach to present json data that has been captured to another file, for example, it's a handy trick that i use often when developing something with json as a data format.